


four ghosts

by ninemoons42



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Afterlife, Aftermath of Torture, Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe - Horror, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Modern: No Powers, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Gen, Haunted Houses, Haunting, Horror, Inspired by Discord, Inspired by Poetry, Inspired by Real Events, Talking To Dead People, angry ghosts, ghost story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-11 00:47:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15961124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Lunafreya Nox Fleuret returns to the scene of a horrific event to try and make sense of it.When she encounters the four victims of that horror, her first instinct is to help them -- but what if there is no help to give or to grant or to pray for?





	four ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> This fic discusses themes of torture, horrible deaths, and angry ghosts, so if at any point you feel that this isn't the story for you -- please don't hesitate to click the back button.

It’s the quiet that shakes her awake, and the sudden diminishing of the rumbling in her bones, the thrum and judder of wheels on potholed roads, skidding in the aftermath of another one of those late-afternoon showers -- she wakes up to the breeze slashing at her cheeks, miraculously scrubbed-smelling and crisp, and there’s a warmth that hovers, not quite hesitant, at her elbow.

And she blinks and tries to remember -- this face, this girl, the long sweet drawl of her. A smile that seems at odds with the deepening lines in the corners of her eyes. 

Try as she might to sit up straight and put on her own smile, her company-and-guests smile -- the effort is wasted when she yawns and shivers and she has to blush, she has to look away, as embarrassed as a child spilling tea into the biscuit tin. “Excuse me. Oh, that was -- not very nice of me.”

“Come on now, we all get worn out and by the look of you, by the sound of you, you’re well within your rights to be exhausted. Look worse than if you’d been herding all day.” 

“Herding what?”

“Anything.” The girl in the driver’s seat pushes her cap back onto the top of her head. Hands closing and opening, just a little jerkily, Lunafreya thinks, on the steering wheel. “Sure I can’t convince you to -- put this errand of yours off until morning?”

And she can’t take offense, can’t be affronted. After all, the girl -- Cindy -- has been driving her up these winding mountain roads for the better part of four hours. Cindy’s gone well out of her way to get her here: to a rusted tottering ruin of a gate that once opened up onto a broad grand sweep of an avenue. A parade-road guarded by four horses in shining tack and four riders in dark greatcoats, in colorful ranks, all of them waiting and watchful.

It’s not even a memory -- it might just be a dream -- the last time she’d seen this gate, she was running away from it, running away from the cruel consuming fire racing for it, running for her very life and every step a sheer risk of dashing herself to pieces on these same lonely slopes.

She makes herself blink the thought away. Makes herself ignore the prick of tears, the sharp edges of mourning driven into her heart, still too fresh. Makes herself speak, steady calm voice: “I -- need to be here now. It can’t be in the morning. What I’m looking for, here, what I’ve come to do, I have to do tonight. Or I will never be able to forgive myself. Never be able to look myself in the mirror again.”

Cindy’s face darkens some more. Lines in her face pinching together, and how Lunafreya wishes she could accept that gentle offer. That implicit refuge.

Because here, on the road, in the insipid light of the fading afternoon, the gate -- and the land beyond it -- is swathed in autumn and a wind that moans and cries and mourns.

“I can’t ask you about this thing you’re doing, I heard you on the phone, you’re -- you do know we know who you are? And by we, I mean, most people in this part of the world. Sort of famous aren’t you.” Cindy seems to grimace, and before Lunafreya can apologize, she slumps a little in her seat. Adds, “No, like I said, ain’t asking, not you, not today. But -- if you know this place, and you probably do or else you wouldn’t even be here in the first place, you wouldn’t even be looking for it -- you know no one comes back from here easy. People going missing. People losing chunks of time, memory, sometimes all their money and phones and things.”

“It’s complicated.” How many times has she said those words? Who has heard her say them? Her brother, her friends who’re practically family too. Her bosses. “I know all the stories. I’m afraid of the stories. But -- I have to be here. And if I couldn’t explain why to -- people I do know, then, forgive me, I wouldn’t know how to start explaining it to you.”

“Wasn’t asking you to.” And the words are almost curt, but Cindy is shaking her head. Is holding out her hand.

Lunafreya can’t help but take it: any warmth in this place. Any human contact, in the face of this thing she’s come to do. She wraps both of her hands around Cindy’s rough glove and holds on, just to be human, just to be afraid, just for a moment.

And then she pulls away, and opens the passenger-side door of the truck, and she just misses a deep muddy rut in the road when she jumps out. Her backpack is a heavy weight dangling from her shoulder, crammed with -- things that she’d packed helter-skelter, flying blind and willful. Candles, mint-flavored candy, a few packed sandwiches, an extra canteen of water, a blanket-scarf of lopsided knitted wool. Three cigarette lighters rattling around in her pockets and a penknife on the chain on which she carries her wallet. A map, and a moth-eaten book that smells of ashes and gunpowder, and -- all the way down in the bottom of the bag -- a page torn out of a library book, mostly composed of a reproduction of a photograph.

Four young men in black and gold, heads bowed, standing guard around an empty stone seat.

The mud -- covers most of the road, is what she discovers, as she walks carefully around the front end of the truck that’s still idling, and she has to be careful where she steps, or else the road will suck her steps down and strand her here in truth, on this threshold.

Around, and right to the drooping menace of the broken gate, its ash-gray halves: she thinks of her brother, and the way he carries himself, and she -- does her best to borrow some of that veneer for the here and now. Shoulders straight. Chin up. Hands open and ready, hovering by her pockets.

“Lunafreya.”

She turns back to -- Cindy’s voice, something alive, in all this bleak world of leaf-shadows and the haunting stoop of the dense and overgrown and vine-choked trees. Dusk, creeping in, washing out everything she can see. Colors fading away -- except for the red truck and its mud-splatter, and the girl sitting at its controls. Bright cap, bright hair, worried sliver of a smile. 

And Cindy says, “I will pray that you come back.”

Lunafreya bows her head, and murmurs, “Thank you. Truly.”

Turns away from the truck and -- here is a gap in the gate that might let her through, and she reaches for the metal.

The words come to her, in fits and starts, childhood prayers and hymns in a jumble. 

_Upon us lay grace so we may come to rest with those who have gone before. Upon us lay shelter and strength so we may find our long home. Upon us lay light so we may make our way to freedom._

And maybe it’s her imagination, but -- there’s a sound like a long low sigh that sweeps at the hems of her brother’s coat -- that she’d stolen from his closet with mumbled apologies -- it doesn’t sound like a curse. 

It sounds like a weeping voice.

She slips through the gate and when she chances a glance over her shoulder -- the road is gone, and the truck is gone, and Cindy is gone, and there is nothing but mist behind her. Nothing but muffled space.

So she takes up the words again, and the melody that went with those words filters back in, slowly.

The air gone completely still, swallowing up the song that she’s trying to sing: and she shivers, and thinks of trees sighing and rustling, sending up a whispering kind of laughter. Thinks of leaves scattered on the ground, skittering through open doorways and the curtains flying like flags. Leaves that were bigger than hands, bigger than the saucer beneath her teacup, red and gold and burnt-brown, and threads of wilted green on the stem-ends. 

This place is less than real to her, even in the corners of her mind: the long crisp fall-mornings of outdoor lessons. The endless blue sky above and the wind driving wisp-white clouds in every possible direction, horizon to horizon. Birds flying in their great arrowing flocks, calling like distant laughter and silly jokes. Flash of running, tails and paws on the move, chasing the scents of buttered toast, of baked marshmallows and applesauce.

Nights of cold clear starlight, of blazing sunsets that seemed to paint the heavens with brilliant color. Meteor showers, and candle-flicker from within hollowed-out gourds, within finger-painted pots, scatter of candy-wrappers and confetti, the colors of the paper too jarring, against the mellowed leaves, the branches raising their gnarls and their empty boles to the sky.

Stripes on scarves: that’s the memory that rises in her, now. Yarn, in odds and ends of color, and crazy-colored stripes, tassels in fraying black. A whisper of a thump, like knees hitting soft damp loamy earth, and surprise in vivid wide eyes, and the pain that fell away into blushing and laughter -- contagious and sweet and ending in thrown leaves, in a heap of boots, the burnished colors of the world, four bright smiles that she can almost truly remember --

And then the house -- or the ruin of it -- appears before her. Has she been moving all this time? But she’s been watching those memory-days play out and not -- the shift of her feet, or the shift of the evening around her, lower and lower like the sky reaching down to plant itself into the ground. The mist, ever present, curling around tumbled walls. Bricks, and shards of glass still stubbornly clinging to hollow-faced window-frames. A cracked door in a cracked frame, in the middle of crater-shapes of ash and burned stone.

The shock of it -- the memory of that door in its polished dark wood and its gleaming fittings, and the reality of it now, listing drunken and pained -- the sob tears out of her, the fear grows shackles and chains and roots her in place, and -- no, no, she has to, she has to --

Forward! Barreling through the door and into the malevolent croon of the darkness beyond it. Smoke-stained ceiling, gaping holes above her, and everywhere she looks she sees -- 

“Where are you,” she says, and she claps her hand over her mouth but it’s too late: the words echo back to her, broken with every repetition, shattered sounds.

The words she’d said.

And the words she’d said or sung or prayed at the gate.

Echoes in the dark and a pulse faintly beating in the soles of her feet, a pulse that isn’t hers, irregular, shuffling. A pulse of movement, and -- it’s coming for her, it’s coming, closer, closer -- 

Too late to think now of things like -- candles, or flashlights. The blasting clear beam of the flash-LED on her phone. All she can do is try to breathe.

Try to fight the instinct to -- run hide cower _no_ \-- 

Movement catching in the corners of her vision and -- somehow she works up the presence of mind to grab her penknife and -- think about how useless that weight is in her shaking nerveless hand and -- glide, and flutter, going past.

Shape of a veil, and the shape of the being beneath the veil. There is elegance to that soundless step. There is precision in that stop, just to her left and ahead of her. Hands, ash-stained, rising out of the veil and pulling it down -- she nearly screams because she’s anticipating -- a skull, a blank head-shape, a decaying corpse and that’s not what she sees.

The name is on the tip of her tongue.

His face, his beautiful ruined face. Burn-marks dark and jagged, and his eyelids sunken over -- hollows, she thinks. His beautiful ruined face and his eyes taken from him by fire.

And, having seen him, having recognized him, she begins to weep as the others step into her presence, one after the other, like actors getting ready to perform their parts.

The parts of ghosts, of restless shades, caught here in this ruin, pinned here in death -- 

It’s not sound that announces the next one. Not a step.

It’s the cold: and Lunafreya fumbles at the closures of her coat, at the scarf in her bag, and none of those can protect her from the sight of her own living warm breath turning into misting icy crystals, shimmering motes floating before her, letting her see -- the massive sword driven right into his bared chest. 

A sword that’s an insult to the vital memory of him, in his heart, ghostly metal length and breadth through the head of the bird of prey that he’d worn proudly in his skin. 

And yet he marches past her and stands at attention, and now she remembers him leaning against the gate to serve out a night’s watch, having volunteered for the task even when he was years away from taking a rank of his own.

The third presence is -- the song, she thinks. The forlorn whistle, the jagged chorus, the wounded verses coming through the walls. No words that she can make out, or perhaps the words are in the languages of the dead, uneasy, fretful.

He appears in the abrupt silence: the gold in his hair is all gone and he is nothing but a wan shape in the world. His freckles, his smile, the lines in his face that had come from laughter, the old scars of running and stumbling on his knees -- all erased from him, and in the place of all these cheerful marks -- the horror of black tears flowing from his eyes, black frozen on his cheeks. 

As if that weren’t horror enough -- the mouth that had always been ready to quirk into a smile, into a laugh, into stammering nervous kindness has been slashed mercilessly wider. Long gashes out from the corners of his lips, pointing to his ears. 

It’s a perverse thing to see him like this, gouged out and all the words slashed away, all the cheerful bluster, and nothing left of him but a monotone dirge.

They surround her, the three of them. They regard her. 

They are here, with her, and she cries some more and she can’t take her eyes off of them, where she’s rooted to the spot, but not in fear.

Regret, regret, why did it take her so long to come back here, why did she wait, why? 

And now they are no longer her friends, they are no longer recognizable, they are on the other side of a door that she can’t pass through, and -- she reaches out to the one in the veil and he stands, stoic, suffering, as her fingertips pass through his shoulder.

“Here you are.”

Human words! A human voice! Here, among these ghosts --

Scream, she has to scream, because she knows that voice, because she knows that shadow that’s looming over her, stretching out before her, and -- that shadow is distorted and -- no, no, she doesn’t want to, she can’t bear to -- she wants to see him and she doesn’t want to see how he’s been -- 

He’s no more than her age when he appears before her, rising out of his own shadow. Black suit-jacket. Black shirt. Black trousers. Impeccable, he would have been dressed so perfectly and so well, except for -- 

“Don’t be afraid.”

And the words are gentle and they are underlined by the harsh rattle of the metal wrapped around his neck for a noose -- chain-links wrapped so tightly around his throat she can see the bruising in his skin. Chain-links visibly digging into his neck. How can he speak? How can he sound like -- like the boy she’d grown up with? The boy who liked books, who told her silly stories about aquarium-bright fish following him around, swimming in the air just at his ear-level? How can he smile at her?

“Why?” is all she can make herself say. Is all the sound that can come out of her mouth. “Why, Noctis?”

Shrug. Smile. The chains wrap around him, tighten around him, constrict him. “It was what it was. I don’t know about reasons. For all I know, there aren’t any.”

“I can’t believe that. I refuse to believe that. You didn’t do anything wrong! You weren’t hurting anyone, you were trying to help -- ”

“That’s what we thought we were doing,” and Noctis seems to sigh, long slow sad sound. 

“I wasn’t there, but I knew,” she insists. 

“I know that now. I know you believed. Thanks.” Tilt of his head, and the familiar gesture becomes horrific, becomes grotesque, framed in chains -- and she closes her eyes and covers her face and she can’t bear to keep looking.

“So why,” she begins, when the tears begin to fall in earnest. “You’re -- stuck here. The stories about this place. I knew it was you, it was all of you, the moment I heard about -- the presence. It couldn’t have been any other. Not in this place.”

“We were sacrificed.” The words are plain and quiet and matter-of-fact, and she can’t breathe for the juxtaposition, for the idea that he’s creating, for the story that he’s telling her. “Sacrificed here. They said we were the enemy. So they destroyed us. Left us here. There’s a curse and all.” He even makes the exact same disgruntled inarticulate sound that used to make her laugh, in the exact same register, only -- jangling. “We’d stop the -- visitors -- if we could. If it were possible. There’s no point in them coming here.”

Frown, and he adds, “There’s no point in _you_ coming here.”

“That’s what they all said.” She makes herself take the hand that he offers her. The chain brushes against her skin, and she shudders, and can’t break away. “I came here anyway.”

“Why?”

Behind him, the others -- Ignis, Gladiolus, and Prompto -- they stand shoulder-to-shoulder. Eyes on her and she can’t, she won’t shy away now, even though she’s frightened, even though she can’t bear to see, to understand, the horrors they’ve known.

The horrors they didn’t survive.

And she says, “I didn’t want to believe -- I refused to believe -- ”

Now Noctis sounds like a ghost when he laughs: he sounds exactly like the rattling of his chains.

The smile of Noctis that’s a frozen curve of pain -- and hatred, and she’d never known him to wear that, and she grits her teeth against the scream that lodges in her throat.

“So did we. More fool us. Look what happened.”

Babble of fearful voices growing and growing and whisper-shouting, rising -- 

Shattered rasp of his voice. Shadows lengthening in his face -- he’s gaunt, he’s worn, he’s old suddenly, like he’s caught in merciless time, just an arm’s-length away and he’s fading, he’s speaking in a voice of pure rage. 

“Look what they did to them, Lunafreya! What they did to me! Do you know why I have these?” He breaks away and he shakes his bound hands, and drops of blood fall onto the floor and vanish instantly -- a red renewing stream, vivid eternal. “Did that story ever come out? _They made me watch._ You see what was done to them. I watched every single moment of it! I watched my friends die for me -- they killed me after, and it was a long death -- ” 

“Noctis!” And she screams, out of her terror, out of wanting to catch his attention. 

Out of the distant and receding hope of speaking to him.

Building and building, the screams, the fear -- are the others screaming, now, too? Wide eyes, open mouths -- she can’t look away, she can’t even cower, they are standing around her -- the shadows of them, all four of them, looming -- 

Someone is screaming her name -- 

*

She’s used to the shriek of her phone, to the unexpected calls at unexpected hours, and when the clipped voice comes through on her voicemail -- “Might need some help with the route tonight” -- she puts her cap back on, and texts her grandfather, and gets back into her truck with a flask of fresh-brewed coffee.

It’s a cold night, a starless and moonless night, and the wind howls outside her rolled-up windows, and not even the playlist that Monica had put together for her can muffle the hair-raising note of it.

Not for the first time, she considers packing up her things and moving back to the city -- 

Beep and flash, her phone receiving word of a possible incident on the road -- she swings the truck into a swift tight left-hand turn and keeps driving, gritting her teeth, because on the second glance she recognizes where she’s going -- 

“Not this again, shit,” she mutters. “Not this shit again.”

She nearly drives past the gate, and the ramshackle walls -- but she hits the brakes hard as soon as she recognizes the woman.

Lunafreya -- Cindy has to bite back the urge to add the noble title she had been born with -- shivering, bruised, singed around the edges.

Eyes too wide open, enough to show whites all around.

And that gaze pinned to a fire, growing and growing in the night, throwing obscene light into the darkness.

So Cindy parks some distance away. Makes noise as she approaches. Calls, “Hey,” from ten feet away.

“Hello.”

There’s still a cigarette lighter in Lunafreya’s hand.

“Good job,” Cindy hears herself say, once she puts it all together. The gate flung open, the fire, the exact same pothole, the burn-mark darkening on the other woman’s thumb. 

“It might not be enough,” and Lunafreya’s voice is hollow and small. “I did what I could.”

“If you did something, then it’s enough,” she says, gently.

Lunafreya turns to her, then.

Tear-stains, age-lines, and some kind of terrible weight like sorrow, tense on her shoulders.

“I was too late for my friends.”

And Cindy has about a thousand million questions running through her mind.

But again Lunafreya speaks, trembling, shaking.

Not to her though -- not even in her direction.

_Upon us lay grace so we may come to rest with those who have gone before. Upon us lay shelter and strength so we may find our long home. Upon us lay light so we may make our way to freedom._

Some kind of prayer, she thinks. Some kind of liturgy for -- the dead, if she’s understanding the words correctly. Old words.

And what good are old words against ghosts? 

She wonders, and watches Lunafreya shiver.

**Author's Note:**

> I took inspiration for this one from a book on Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia Romanova -- the book is called _Four Sisters_ and it's written by Helen F. Rappaport.
> 
> Why did I write a horror story for September? Because the month's challenge in one of my FFXV Discord servers is "autumn". I guess I associate ghosts with this time of the year.
> 
> Come talk to me on Tumblr at my FFXV sideblog [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or at my main [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


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